Encompassed and o\'erwhelmed, amid showers of arrows and surrounded by the smoke and flames of his burning ]3alisades, he fought with desperate valour, as one by one his com])anions fell; till at length, he stood alone and wounded; then, as his foes rushed forward, he fell headlong into the l:)lazing fire. But again and again, it is said, he has a])- peared in great crises, urging men to coin"ageous deeds. The Kitchawans, or Kitchawonks, had an imj^ortant village on the neck connecting the point with the mainland. The oyster beds in the ^dcinity were es])ecially valued by them, and were, no doubt, the object of frequent disputes. The Indian name of the point was Senasqua. An early settler on the point was one Teller, and the land became known to rivermen as

296 The Hudson River

Teller's; but after a while this man died, and his wife, Sarah, surviving him by some years, the neighbours, with easy formality, dubbed it Sarah's Point. Then the Cortlandt name was attached to it; and after that. Doctor Underbill, having built his handsome Italian villa and established his famous grapery there, stood god-father to the locality. Somewhere in the course of its history the name of old Chief Croton was attached to it, and is gradually superseding all the others. From the Underbill vineyards have gone out unnumbered thousands of bottles of sweet Catawba wine. At the old ferry-house at Croton, a party of New York yeomen, under the command of Captain Daniel Williams, were surprised and captured in 1782 by a party of British cavalry. But there was one incident in the history of this place that seems to have been the small pivot upon which the great structure of America's future swung. From Haverstraw, on the other side of the river, on the twenty-second of September, 1780, Major Andre saw the war-ship Vulture drop down the river to escape a galling fire from Teller's Point.